Staying current with Tech/Developer News

30 Dec 2013

Hacker News and Newsletter - News and Articles

There is a lot of love and hate for Hacker News. Regardless you should be reading it to see what is trending in the tech world. The site is not really what the names implies. It is geared towards the tech startup/founder who develops. This is no surprise since it was created by Y Combinator but really the site is visited by all different types of developers and innovators. A lot of industry experts read and participate in the comments. Just remember when digging through the comments to read a few on both sides of the debate. I strongly recommend you signup for the newsletter and avoid constantly visiting the website and hitting refresh. The newsletter is a great weekly email that highlights the best articles and comments. Here is the MailChimp archive of past issues.

Explore GitHub - Trending Repos

I really enjoy seeing the open source repositories that are trending on GitHub. It is a quick way to see what other developers in your language are staring and forking. For instance you can quickly see the trending repositories for C# for a given day, week or month. Sometimes I will peruse other languages and see what problems they are solving. I might ask myself "what are people using golang for?" and then I see the answer by checking the golang trending repositories.

Subscribe to the GitHub digest and don't worry about missing anything. I recommend the weekly email. The email will also include what repos were starred by who your are following so be sure you are following other developers.

Using Twitter Lists

A often overlooked feature of Twitter are the lists. Most users follow a mix of friends, family, peers and notable people. In order to filter out the social noise we can use the lists to restrict the timeline to only developers. I don't browse this as much as the above two methods but I do like seeing specific people's opinions as things happen. And since lists can be public there is no point in trying to build your own. There are a lot of public lists. If you have some good ones please share in the comments.

A good way to find new lists is to start with a popular twitter user and see what lists already belong to. For example here are all the lists that Scott Hanselman is a member of twitter.com/shanselman/memberships.

Here are some examples.

Others

Quora is useful if you want to learn about the tech world culture. For questions like:

I am subscribed to the newsletter but not sure I would recommend it for a tech news source. They tailor their newsletter and the algorithm needs some work.

Podcasts

Humor. Be sure to check out xkcd to keep your geeky sense of humor.

Tags
Notice a typo or something incorrect?
Leave a comment or submit changes via GitHub.